Used electronic components, in particular high-price components such as microcontrollers, for example, are increasingly being recycled. This can be eminently practical for cost reasons and in order to conserve resources. However, more and more electronic components are recycled “illegally”. By way of example, the components are disassembled from used apparatuses that have previously been brought into corresponding countries, in particular countries with a low wage economy. These electronic components are then re-declared, if appropriate, in order to be sold again. In the process, the information is lost that the components have already been used and are subject for example to a higher probability of failure than new electronic components. Nevertheless, it has already demonstrably happened that such re-declared electronic components have been used in avionics or military technologies, which have very stringent reliability requirements for electronic components.
One possibility for solving this problem includes monitoring the entire logistics of used electronic components. This is very complex, expensive and implementable only with difficulty on account of present-day complex logistics systems. Furthermore, these components are often so-called “off-shelf products”, which means that they may originate from a wide variety of sources, for example also from used apparatuses. This fact makes complete monitoring of the logistics virtually impossible.